I live in Los Angeles and I'm lucky enough to write about the thing I love most: movies. I'm a graduate of Vassar College and Northwestern University and for 15 years I worked at Forbes mostly covering the entertainment industry. Although I've moved into the world of corporate journalism, I still contribute blog posts here.

Five Ways Disney's 'Star Wars' Franchise Could Go Spectacularly Wrong

Yesterday, Disney announced that it is buying Lucasfilm for $4 billion. What that really means is that Disney is buying the Star Wars franchise for $4 billion.

That’s a ton of money for a franchise that might be getting long in the tooth. As Kevin Roose pointed out yesterday on New York Magazine‘s web site, the timing of the announcement was very strange. Most media in New York are either struggling with no power or focused on the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy at the moment. Roose suggests that Disney didn’t wait to make the announcement because 1) the company wanted to cheer up folks in storm-ravaged cities, 2) they were going to make the announcement yesterday anyway and just went ahead with their schedule or 3) the deal is a financial dud.

I think for the most part, this was a very safe bet for Disney. The price is about the same that Disney paid for Marvel in 2010 (and less than it paid for Pixar in 20060. Star Wars comes with legions of devoted fans of all ages and a vast universe of 17,000 characters to be exploited.

But as screenwriter William Goldman famously said, in Hollywood, “no one knows anything.” A studio might think it has a can’t-miss formula for a blockbuster with the prefect stars attached and the best marketing plan and then everything flops horribly. So I’m going to play the skeptic. Here are five ways Disney’s purchase of Lucasfilm could go horribly wrong:

1) John Carter

Yes, The Avengers was the biggest hit of the year but let’s not forget John Carter. The $250 million film (not counting marketing costs) brought in only $283 million at the global box office. A film has to at least double its production budget to even begin to think about breaking even since, on average, half of box office revenues go to theater owners. The point is, Disney is capable of spectacular hits and spectacular flops. Obviously Star Wars has a big advantage over John Carter because it is already such a well-known brand, but sometimes in Hollywood, the best ideas go terribly wrong.

2) Jar Jar Binks

No one at Disney is stupid enough to try and make a Jar Jar Binks spin-off. The Gungan is the most hated character in all of the Star Wars universe. But what if Binks is a fair representative of the rest of the fringe characters? I admit, I don’t know all of the member of the Galactic Senate so maybe there are some really wonderful characters hiding back there. But maybe there are also a lot more Jar Jar Binks. Lucas thought Binks would be a great character for kids and I’m sure there are some kids out there who love him. But just because someone is a Star Wars character, doesn’t mean he’s worthy of a spin-off.

3) Ant-Man vs. Merl Tosche

Disney is already reaching deep into Marvel’s comic universe to come up with new superhero franchises. The studio announced that an Ant-Man movie is slated for 2015. While Ant-Man is no Iron Man, I’m sure he has plenty of fans. I had to look him up but I’m not a big comic book fan. But what about Merl Tosche? You don’t know who he is? He’s the guy who founded the Tosche station on Tattooine. OK, I picked his name at random from the Star Wars Wiki. I didn’t know who he was either. But that’s the point. The vast majority of fans have never heard of the vast majority of those 17,000 Star Wars characters. The number of people we’d like to see spin-off films about (Han Solo, please) is actually relatively small.

4) Star Wars fatigue

There is probably only a small possibility that people will get tired of Star Wars. The franchise has been going strong since 1977. But the market is already pretty Star Wars saturated. There are aisles dedicated to Star Wars toys in every Target. The Clone Wars is a hit on Cartoon Network. And there’s no shortage of clothes, lunch boxes and mugs dedicated to the Star Wars universe. How much more can the market take? At some point, is Star Wars just going to seem too prevalent. And if that happens, people will want to find the next new things which leads me to my next concern.

5) What are we missing?

Studios are becoming more and more risk averse. They don’t want to spend money on daring new ideas, they want to spend money on stories with proven track records. From a financial point of view, I get that. But as a movie lover, it makes me kind of sad. Yes, it’s possible to make something incredibly entertaining and even a little original from an older story. But it doesn’t provide the same kind of jolt we got when we first saw The Matrix or Avatar. We didn’t know those worlds existed and we were so happy to discover them. By focusing on Star Wars, Disney will pass on a lot of original ideas and that’s too bad.

What do you think? What are some other ways Disney’s purchase could go wrong?

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I think any Episode 7 would be a tremendous risk, somewhere along the odds of successfully navigating an asteroid field. But I’ll probably pay to see it, particularly if it features an existing character. But then, we’re back into prequel land and prequels, in general, suck.

I think that the Ant Man analogy is kind of unfair. Hank Pym was a founding member of the Avengers and not some nobody. Marvel fans know who he is. This farmer guy is not really that similar considering no Star Wars fan (no matter how far the get into the Extended Universe) will know who he is. Let’s remain optimistic until we know more. More Star Wars could definitely be a good thing, take it from a Star Wars fan for life.

Fair enough. You clearly know way more about the Marvel/Star Wars world than I do. But I think for a lot of movie fans, it’s still going to come down to introducing new characters and getting us to really care about them.

Indeed Star Wars is a very unique franchise. It’s ground-breaking visual contribution to sci-fi was that it brought the real world to Space. Before that space ships gleamed, even Kubrik’s 2001 was about futuristic state of the art. In Star Wars things were beaten up.

Return of the Jedi was released in 1983 and I got involved with licensing around 1984. Once the toys were released, every year Star Wars was the big hit and every year the stores just couldn’t get enough. Then came Christmas 1985, finally all the stores had enough inventory but there was no film.

Come January the stores were trying to ship back their over-stock and Star Wars was deemed a disaster and past its sell-by. For most franchises that would have been the end of it, after all Star Wars was films, not TV episodes that could be endlessly repeated.

So the toy industry moved on and cloned the concept with Master’s of the Universe toys from Mattel with TV animation by US based Filmation. Not to be outdone Mattel’s competitors, like Hasbro and Kenner using cheaper Far East studios, followed with host of boy targeted offerings like Transformers and M.A.S.K, giving the animation away to sell toys.

During this entire period Disney was nowhere as far as hit licensed product was concerned. Indeed when Katzenberg did revive their fortunes in the nineties with the series of animated films – Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and Lion King, the merchandise sold to girls. These titles were also designed as films first, not as merchandising vehicles, and when Pocahontas and The Hunchback hit the skids it wasn’t surprising, after all who wants to buy a Hunchback?

Disney stores arrived and their Disney merchandise was similarly aimed at girls and pre-school, however Pixar’s Buzz Lightyear saved the day for boys. Disney bought Power Rangers and then produced Cars, a concept I had mused on for many years, having seen Thomas Tank Engine’s success.

Cars was a no-brainer. My concept had a lead character called Trucky, a pick up truck who could pull the rest out of trouble. I did a few sketches but could never decide whether the eyes should go in the headlights or the windscreen. I doubt whether anyone else realised just what a brilliant job Disney did with those eyes.

However Cars was a gap waiting to be filled, great merchandising ideas are few and far between. We’ve just had the Licensing Show in London and it was more of the same.

Star Wars is still Lego’s best selling line. At the end of the day, like Batman and Bond, Star Wars is a survivor, to trump it is a huge deal but then so is $4 Billion dollars.

Back in 1975 Elstree Film Studios was struggling and got to make the original Star Wars movie because Lucas was a new boy, on a tight budget.

Ironically I worked out of Elstree Film Studios in the late nineties and met a few who worked on the original film. Of course, while working on it, they weren’t seeing the finished effect. They all just saw it as cowboys in space, a dumb idea without a hope in hell.